Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Dec. 30th, 2012 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroBefore the events of Final Fantasy 7, a SOLDIER 1st Class named Genesis goes rogue, and several of Shinra’s best men are dispatched to find him. This is in the midst of a war with Wutai, of course; and dealing with both of these reveals a giant conspiracy of terrible experiments. Spiky hair and giant swords abound.
You probably should file this under “Sequels that don’t make sense if you haven’t played the original,” though it’s definitely not as bad as many others. While naming the main character (Zack Fair) of this is pretty much a spoiler for Final Fantasy 7, it does hold together reasonably well as a story in its own right. And as far as I can tell from my notes, I last played FF7 in 1998, so a strong or recent knowledge isn’t really necessary.
I really like Zack, incidentally. He’s kinda shallow, a bit of a doofus who does squats for fun; but his upbeat personality and lack of deep psychological damage makes him a much more pleasant character to spend 30 hours with than the average Final Fantasy protagonist. And there’s enough development from the folks around him (Angeal, Genesis, Sephiroth, Cloud, the Turks) that it doesn’t seem too static a setting. Also, the world keeps changing around them and things keep happening—they didn’t need to put the pieces back in the box, after all.
It’s an action-rpg, falling somewhere between Final Fantasy 12 and a Mana series game. Battles are generally random, but happen on the world map with real-time dodging and menu-shifting, with a slight delay before your actions go into effect so you can’t just spam attacks. If you want to switch to equipped materia to cast spells or choose an item to use, you need to do that while dodging away from enemy attacks.
The “slots” systems for gaining levels and powering up is weird—some parts of it appear to be random, but the game definitely forces certain outcomes at specific points (like Zack leveling up). It makes the battles a bit more “fast and loose” than the exact numbers would demand, because you can randomly heal (even above your listed max values), do super attacks, or level up your materia. There are essentially no “bad” outcomes, and I found that the RNG was generally kind with providing attacks at useful times.
The big sidequest setup is the “mission” system, which can be accessed from save points and usually involves a few battles and a small dungeon area; or a reprise of a boss battle. There are 300 of them of varying difficulty, and the game lets you know how hard they’ll be based on your level, so as you progress in the game, the listed difficulty of missions decreases. Doing missions up to the Hard difficulty as soon as they’re available generally makes you much stronger than you need to be to get through the story events. I had 58% mission completion when I finished and the story final boss was a joke.
After a few dozen missions, I started hoping for more variety in them. Don’t get me wrong, the system is pretty fun for something relatively simple, but pretty much every mission is the same sequence of wandering around through near-identical areas fighting random encounters and finding the couple of tucked-away chests, then fighting a spiked boss battle that’s slightly harder than the random encounters. The only different ones are the boss re-battles. This game does have a few minigames and things—couldn’t one of them have been a mission? Or maybe there could be a “reach the end quickly” or “find the item without dying” mission?
The most interesting mission (and this says something about me) was actually the Kill 1,000 Troops mission, which took me almost 90 minutes but caused me to gain 4 levels and master all the materia I was carrying. (The troops vary their attacks in waves, which keeps you on your toes. Go in with immunity to poison, silence and stop, if you can.)
The minigames are of varying quality, though the fact you can’t easily replay them makes them less noteworthy. Also, very few of them are strictly necessary, and some are even really easily missable. (I only learned about them by reading a walkthrough later.)
There’s a New Game Plus feature which lets you keep your levels, materia and DMW progress, but you lose a bunch of equipment and all of your mission completion, which is irritating. I suspect it’s mostly for either playing on Hard mode or replaying just the story really quickly—you could get through the game in under 10 hours if you didn’t do any missions.
Overall: It’s a fun, if repetitive time-waster with a decent story and good gameplay. Generally recommended for fans of action-rpgs.
You probably should file this under “Sequels that don’t make sense if you haven’t played the original,” though it’s definitely not as bad as many others. While naming the main character (Zack Fair) of this is pretty much a spoiler for Final Fantasy 7, it does hold together reasonably well as a story in its own right. And as far as I can tell from my notes, I last played FF7 in 1998, so a strong or recent knowledge isn’t really necessary.
I really like Zack, incidentally. He’s kinda shallow, a bit of a doofus who does squats for fun; but his upbeat personality and lack of deep psychological damage makes him a much more pleasant character to spend 30 hours with than the average Final Fantasy protagonist. And there’s enough development from the folks around him (Angeal, Genesis, Sephiroth, Cloud, the Turks) that it doesn’t seem too static a setting. Also, the world keeps changing around them and things keep happening—they didn’t need to put the pieces back in the box, after all.
It’s an action-rpg, falling somewhere between Final Fantasy 12 and a Mana series game. Battles are generally random, but happen on the world map with real-time dodging and menu-shifting, with a slight delay before your actions go into effect so you can’t just spam attacks. If you want to switch to equipped materia to cast spells or choose an item to use, you need to do that while dodging away from enemy attacks.
The “slots” systems for gaining levels and powering up is weird—some parts of it appear to be random, but the game definitely forces certain outcomes at specific points (like Zack leveling up). It makes the battles a bit more “fast and loose” than the exact numbers would demand, because you can randomly heal (even above your listed max values), do super attacks, or level up your materia. There are essentially no “bad” outcomes, and I found that the RNG was generally kind with providing attacks at useful times.
The big sidequest setup is the “mission” system, which can be accessed from save points and usually involves a few battles and a small dungeon area; or a reprise of a boss battle. There are 300 of them of varying difficulty, and the game lets you know how hard they’ll be based on your level, so as you progress in the game, the listed difficulty of missions decreases. Doing missions up to the Hard difficulty as soon as they’re available generally makes you much stronger than you need to be to get through the story events. I had 58% mission completion when I finished and the story final boss was a joke.
After a few dozen missions, I started hoping for more variety in them. Don’t get me wrong, the system is pretty fun for something relatively simple, but pretty much every mission is the same sequence of wandering around through near-identical areas fighting random encounters and finding the couple of tucked-away chests, then fighting a spiked boss battle that’s slightly harder than the random encounters. The only different ones are the boss re-battles. This game does have a few minigames and things—couldn’t one of them have been a mission? Or maybe there could be a “reach the end quickly” or “find the item without dying” mission?
The most interesting mission (and this says something about me) was actually the Kill 1,000 Troops mission, which took me almost 90 minutes but caused me to gain 4 levels and master all the materia I was carrying. (The troops vary their attacks in waves, which keeps you on your toes. Go in with immunity to poison, silence and stop, if you can.)
The minigames are of varying quality, though the fact you can’t easily replay them makes them less noteworthy. Also, very few of them are strictly necessary, and some are even really easily missable. (I only learned about them by reading a walkthrough later.)
There’s a New Game Plus feature which lets you keep your levels, materia and DMW progress, but you lose a bunch of equipment and all of your mission completion, which is irritating. I suspect it’s mostly for either playing on Hard mode or replaying just the story really quickly—you could get through the game in under 10 hours if you didn’t do any missions.
Overall: It’s a fun, if repetitive time-waster with a decent story and good gameplay. Generally recommended for fans of action-rpgs.
